First Look: Bird’s 2nd Generation Aeris Is A Big Travel Monster That Is Shipped Directly To Your Door

With five years under the belt, Hampshire-based brand Bird Cycleworks has grown significantly from its humble beginnings and single hardtail mountain bike. The brand operates as a direct-to-consumer business, which means customers purchase their bike online on the Bird website, and it’s shipped directly to their door. As such, Bird is able to offer some impressive pricing on its bikes, with the ability to customise numerous components such as wheels, tyres and forks.

Bird’s growing popularity in the UK (and outside of the UK too) has seen its range swell to seven different models, including hardtails and full suspension bikes. The Aeris is the name of Bird’s full suspension platform, and currently there are four iterations of it covering both 27.5in and 29in wheelsizes, and travel from 120-150mm.

The bike we’ve got here is the Aeris 145, which features a tough alloy frame, 145mm of rear travel, 150-170mm travel fork and 27.5in wheels. Spec and detail-wise, its very much on-trend for a UK long-travel trail bike, though Bird states this one is well up for enduro race action too.

Bird Cycleworks offers its bikes direct-to-consumer.

“The new Deluxe and Super Deluxe shocks take the test winning Aeris performance to a whole new level. Whether you ride for fun, race enduro, or whatever your riding style, the all new Aeris 145 will blow you away with its much improved small bump sensitivity, insanely good climbing performance, and still unbeatable descending” – From Bird Cycleworks.

The Aeris 145 frame is made from butted and hydroformed 6066 alloy tubing – tough, and lower priced than carbon too.External cable routing features throughout – appealing for those who shudder at dealing with fiddly internal routing.You don’t always see bottle cage mounts on full suspension bikes these days, but we like it when we do.Four-bar suspension design rolls on sealed bearings and self-locking collet hardware.

The Aeris is built around a four-bar suspension design, with a horst link rear dropout pivot, and a hollowed swing link that drives the top tube-mounted shock. The main pivot sits a good way above the bottom bracket to pitch inline with the 34T chainring, which in theory, should provide a more neutral feel between pedalling inputs and rear suspension action.

Like the front triangle, the sub-frame is made with welded 6066 alloy tubes that have been butted and hydroformed into their end shape. Bird is also keen to point out that there’s a lot of CNC machined parts in there too. Look closely at the big hunk of metal used for the bottom bracket and main pivot, as well as the dropouts and upper seatstay yoke to see the machining detail on show.

The new generation Aeris 145 is built around a huge 230x65mm rear shock. That gives it a pretty low average leverage ratio of 2.2:1

Compared to the previous version of the Aeris, the new generation frame has moved to a metric-sized rear shock, which in the case of our test bike is a RockShox Super Deluxe RT3. Also noteworthy is the use of not just one bearing mount, but two. That means each eyelet of the rear shock is rolling on cartridge bearings instead of traditional DU bushes. Many full suspension bikes out there are using a bearing mount at one end of the shock, but the Aeris 145 is one of the only bikes we know of that’s using it at both ends. According to Bird, this is to improve rear suspension sensitivity even further.

There are a load of expensive CNC machined pieces of alloy on the Aeris 145 frame, including that big chunk used for the bottom bracket and main pivot.The Aeris 145 has updated to Boost 148x12mm rear hub spacing.The Aeris 145 is 1x specific, and our test bike comes with the current 1x groupset of choice; SRAM GX Eagle.Nice and chunky thru-axle dropouts, with a clevis pivot just forward of the dropout along the chainstay.The main pivot is nice and wide, and there’s clearance for 2.6in wide tyres.Race Face Aeffect dropper post as stock, though a Reverb Stealth is also available as an upgrade.Fabric Scoop saddle is a nice touch from a fellow UK-based brand.The cockpit can be customised by the consumer, so we’ve gone for the nice blue Race Face Atlas bars.The reach measurement on the M/L Aeris is loooooong, so it’s got a dinky stem to bring the bars back.Canadian topography.SRAM supplies most of the kit on Bird bikes, including the Guide R brakes on our Aeris 145 test bike.These are alloy M1900 DT Swiss wheels with a 30mm internal width, though you can go all-out with carbon XMC 1200 wheels if you want to drop some more cashola.The range of Maxxis tyres that Bird has available online is quite staggering – we’ve gone for a Minion DHR/High Roller combo.

The Aeris 145 will be going into a three-way group test as part of an upcoming magazine feature, and this big Bird is currently up in the Lake District with James Vincent, who’s already getting well acquainted with it. He’ll also be trying out the new LT linkage plates that Bird has just released, which boost the Aeris’ rear wheel travel to 160mm.